Patricia sniffed. "So you can pilot us, I suppose. I'll bet you haven't a single idea."
"But I have." He turned to Harbord. "Southeast," he ordered, and the afterjets added their voices to the roar of the others. "Put up to thirty thousand meters," he continued, "we might run into mountains."
The Gaea, named for the ancient goddess of Earth, who was wife to the god Uranus, plunged through the infinity of mist away from the planet's pole. In one respect that pole is unique among the Sun's family, for Uranus revolves, not like Jupiter or Saturn or Mars or the Earth, in the manner of a spinning top, but more with the motion of a rolling ball. Its poles are in the plane of its orbit, so that at one point its southern pole faces the Sun, while forty-two years later, halfway around the vast orbit, the opposite pole is Sunward.
Four decades earlier Young had touched at the southern pole; it would be another forty years before that pole again saw noon.
"The trouble with women," grumbled Harbord, "is that they ask too many questions."
Patricia spun on him. "SchopenhauerI" she hissed. "You ought to be grateful that Patrick Burlingame's daughter is lending her aid to a Yankee expedition!"
"Yeah? Why Schopenhauer?"
"He was a woman-hater, wasn't he? Like youl"
"Then he was a greater philosopher than I thought," grunted Harbord.
"Anyway," she retorted acidly, "a couple of million dollars is a lot of money to pay for a square mile of foggy desert. You won't hog this planet the way you tried to hog Venus."
She was referring, of course, to the Council of Berne's decision of 2059, that the simple fact of an explorer's landing on a planet did not give his nation possession of the entire planet, but only of the portion actually explored. On fog-wrapped Uranus that portion would be small indeed.
"Never mind," put in Ham. "No other nation will argue if America claims the whole fog-ball, because no other nation has a base near enough to get here."
That was true. By virtue of its possession of Saturn's only habitable moon, Titan, the United States was the only nation that could send an exploratory rocket to Uranus. A direct flight from Earth is out of the question, since the nearest approach to the two planets is 1,700,000,000. The flight is made in two jumps; first to Titan, then to Uranus.
But this condition limits the frequency of the visits enormously, for though Saturn and Earth are in conjunction at intervals of a little over a year, Uranus and Saturn are in conjunction only once in about forty years. Only at these times is it possible to reach the vast, mysterious, fog-shrouded planet.
So inconceivably remote is Uranus that the distance to its neighbor, Saturn, is actually greater than the total distance from Saturn to Jupiter, from Jupiter to the asteroids, from these to Mars, and from Mars to the Earth. It is a wild, alien, mystery-cloaked planet with only icy Neptune and Pluto between it and the interstellar void.
Patricia whirled on Ham. "You!" she snapped. "Southeast, eh! Why southeast? Just a guess, isn't it? Truthfully, isn't it?"
"Nope," he grinned. "I have my reasons. I'm trying to save whatever time I can, because our stay here is limited if we don't want to be marooned for forty years until the next conjunction."
"But why southeast?"
"I'll tell you. Did you ever look at a globe of the Earth, Pat? Then maybe you've noticed that all continents, all large islands, and all important penisulas are narrowed to points toward the south. In other words, the northern hemisphere is more favorable for land formation, and as a matter of fact, by far the greater part of the Earth's land is north of the equator.
"The Artie Ocean is nearly surrounded by a ring of land, but the Antarctic's wide open. And that same thing is true of Mars, assuming that the dark, swampy plains are old ocean beds, and also true of the frozen oceans on the night side of Venus.
"So I assume that if all planets had a common origin, and all of them solidified under the same conditions, Uranus must have the same sort of land distribution. What Young found was the land that corresponds to our Antarctica; what I'm looking for is the land that ought to surround this north polar sea."
"Ought to, but maybe doesn't," retorted Pat. "Anyway why southeast instead of due south?"
"Because that direction describes a spiral and lessens the chance of our striking some strait or channel between lands. With a visibility of about fifty feet, it wouldn't take a very wide channel to make us think we were over ocean.
"Even your English Thames would look like the Pacific in this sort of fog, if we happened to come down more than half a hundred feet from either bank."
"And I suppose your American Mississippi would look like Noah's flood," said the girl, and fell to gazing at the gray waste of fog that swirled endlessly past the ports.
Somewhat less than an hour later the Gaea was again descending gingerly and hesitantly. At 85 cm. of air pressure Ham had the rocket slowed almost to a complete stop, and thereafter it dropped on the cushioning blast of the underjets at a speed of inches per minute.
When the barometer read 85.8 cm., Cullen's voice sounded from the stern, where the port was less obscured by the jets themselves. "Something below!*' he called.
There was something. The fog seemed definitely darker, and features or markings of some sort were visible. As the ship settled slowly, Ham watched intently, and at last snapped out the order to land. The Gaea dropped, with a faint jar, to a resting place on a bare, gray graveled plain domed with a hemisphere of mist that shut off vision as definitely as a wall.
There was something wild and alien about the limited scene before them. As the blast died, all of them stared silently into the leaden-hued vapors and Cullen came wordlessly in to join them. In the sudden silence that followed the cutting of the blast, the utter strangeness of the world outside was thrust upon them.
Venus, where Pat had been born, was a queer enough world with its narrow habitable twilight zone, its life-teeming Hotlands, and its mysterious dark side, but it was twin sister to the Earth.
Mars, the desert planet with its great decadent civilization, was yet stronger, but not utterly alien. Out on the moons of Jupiter were outlandish creatures of bizarre little worlds, and on cold Titan, that circled Saturn, were fantastic beings born to that wild and frigid satellite.
But Uranus was a major planet, no more than half-brother to the little inner worlds and less than cousin to the tiny satellites. It was mysterious, unrelated, alien; no one had ever set foot on a major -planet save the daring Young and his men forty years before.
He had explored, out of all the millions of square miles of surface, just one square kilometer forty-five thousand miles away from where they stood. All the rest was mystery, and the thought was enough to subdue even the irrepressible Patricia.
But not for long. "Well," she observed finally, "it looks just like London to me. Same sort of weather we had last time we were there. I think 111 step outside and look for Piccadilly."
"You won't go out yet," snapped Ham. "I want an atmospheric test first."
"For what? Young and his men breathed this air. I suppose you're going to say that that was forty-five thousand miles away, but even a biologist knows that the law of diffusion of gases would keep a planet from having one sort of air at one pole and another at the opposite. If the air was safe there, it is here."
"Yeah?" asked Ham. "Diffusion's all right, but did it ever occur to you that this fog-ball gets most of its heat from inside? That means high volcanic activity, and it might mean an eruption of poisonous gases somewhere near here. I'm having Cullen make a test."
Patricia subsided, watching the silent and efficient Cullen as he drew a sample of Uranian air into an ampule. After a moment she flexed her knees and asked, "Why is the gravitation so weak here? Uranus is fifty-four times as large as the Earth and fifteen times as massive, yet I don't feel any heavier here than at home." Home to Pat, of course, was the little frontier town of Venoble, in the Venusian Cool Country.
"That's the answer," said Ham. "Fifty-four times t
he size of the Earth or Venus, but only fifteen times as heavy. That means its density is much smaller—to be exact .27. Figures out to about nine-tenths the surface gravitation of the Earth, but it feels to me almost equal. We'll check a kilogram weight on the spring balance after a while and get an accurate figure on its mass."
"Safe to breathe?"
"Perfectly. Argon's an inert gas, and a substance can't possibly be poisonous unless it can react chemically in the body."
Pat sniffed. "See? It was safe all the time. I'm going outside."
"You'll wait for me," he growled. "Every time I've indulged that reckless disposition of yours you've got into trouble." He checked the thermometer beyond the port,
nine degrees centigrade—the temperature of late autumn back home. "There's the cause of this perpetual fog," he observed. "The surface is always warmer than the air."
Pat was already pulling a jacket over her shoulders. Ham followed suit, and fell to twisting the handle of the air lock. There was a subdued hissing as the slightly denser Uranian air forced its way in and he turned to speak to Harbord, who was lighting a pipe in great satisfaction—and indulgence strictly forbidden in space, but harmless now that an air supply was assured.
"Keep an eye on us, will you?" Ham said. "Watch us through the port, just in case something happens and we need help."
"We?" grunted Harbord. "Your wife's out of sight already."
With a muttered imprecation, Ham spun around. It was true. The outer door of the air lock was open, and a lazy wisp of fog drifted in, scarcely moving in the utterly stagnant Uranian air.
"The crazy little— Here! Give me that!" He seized a belt with twin holsters, holding a standard automatic as well as a terribly destructive flame pistol. He whipped it around him, seized another bundle, and plunged into the eternal mists of Uranus.
It was exactly as if he stood under an inverted bowl of dull silver. A weird, greenish, half twilight filtered down, but his whole world consisted of the metal ship at his back and a fifty-foot semicircle before him. And Pat—Pat was nowhere visible.
He shouted her name. "Pat!" The sound muffled by the cold dampness of the fog sounded queerly soft to his ears. He bellowed again at the top of his voice, and then swore violently from sheer relief as a thin, hushed reply drifted back out of the grayness.
In a moment she appeared, swinging a zigzag, ropy, greenish-gray organism.
"Look!" she called triumphantly. "Here's the first specimen of Uranian plant life. Loosely organized, reproduced by partition, and—what the devil is the matter?"
"Matter! Don't you know you might have been lost? How did you expect to get back here?"
"Compass," she retorted coolly.
"How do you know it works? We may be right on the magnetic pole, if Uranus has one."
She glanced at her wrist. "Come to think of it, it doesn't work. The needle's swinging free."
"Yes, and you went out unarmed besides. Of all the fool tricks I"
"Young reported no animal life, didn't he? And—wait a minute. I know what you're going to say. 'Forty-five thousand miles away!' "
He glared, "Hereafter," he growled, "you're under orders. You don't go out except in company, and roped together." He drew a length of heavy silken cord from his pocket, and snapped one end to her belt, and the other to his own.
"Oh, don't be so timid! I feel like a puppy on a leash."
"I have to be timid," he responded grimly, "when I'm dealing with a reckless, improvident, careless imp like you."
He disregarded her sniff of disapproval, and set about unwrapping the bundle he had brought. He produced an American flag, and proceeded to dip a depression in the gravel, planted the staff in it and said formally, "I take possession of this land in the name of the United States of America."
"All fifty feet of it?" murmured Patricia, but softly, for, after all, despite her flippant manner, she was loyal to the country of her husband. She fell silent, and the two of them stared at the flag.
It was a strange echo from a pleasant little planet nearly two billion miles away; it meant people and friends and civilization—things remote and almost unreal as they stood here on the soil of this vast, lonely, mysterious planet.
Ham roused from his thoughts. "So!" he said. "Now we'll have a look around."
Young had indicated the technique of exploration on this world where the explorer faced difficulties all but insurmountable.
Ham snapped the end of a fine steel wire to a catch beside [lie air lock. On a spool at his waist was a thousand foot length of it, to serve as an infallible guide back through the obscurity—the only practical means in a region where sound was muffled and even radio waves were shielded almost as completely as by a grounded metal dome. The wire played the part not only of guide but of messenger, since a tug on it rang a bell within the rocket.
Ham waved at Harbord, visibly puffing his pipe behind the port, and they set out. To the limit of their permitted time, Uranus would have to be explored in thousand-foot circles, moving the rocket each time the details of the area were recorded. A colossal task. It was likely, he remarked to Pat, that the vast planet would never be completely explored, especially with the forty-year interval that must pass between visits.
"And especially," she amended, "if they send timorous little better-be-safe-than-sorry explorers like you."
"At least," he retorted, "I expect to return to tell what I've explored even if it's only a myriare, like Young's achievement."
"But don't you see," she rejoined impatiently, "that wherever we go, just beyond our vision there may be something marvelous? We take little thousand-foot samples of the country, and each time we might be missing something that may be the whole significance of this planet. What we're doing is like marking off a few hundred-foot circles on the Earth; how much chance is there of finding part of a city, or a house, or even a human being in our circle?"
"Perfectly true, Pat, but what can we do about it?"
"We could at least sacrifice a few precautions and cover a little more territory."
"But we won't. I happen to care about your safety."
"OhI" she said irritably, turning away. "You're—" Her words were muffled as she ranged out to the full length of the silken cord that bound her to him. She was completely invisible, but occasional jerks and tugs as they tried to move at cross-purposes were evidence enough that they were still joined.
Ham walked slowly forward, examining the pebbled, lifeless terrain where now and then a pool of condensed moisture showed dull, and very occasionally, he came upon one of the zigzag weeds like the one Pat had dropped near the rocket. Apparently rain was unknown on windless Uranus, and the surface moisture followed an endless cycle of condensation in the cool air and evaporation on the warm ground.
Ham came to a spot where boiling mud seemed to be welling up from below, and steamy plumes whirled up to lose themselves in the fog—evidence of the vast internal heat that warmed the planet. He stood staring at it, and suddenly a violent jerk on the cord nearly toppled him backward.
He spun around. Patricia materialized abruptly out of the fog, one hand clutching a ropy plant. She dropped it as she saw him, and suddenly she was clinging frantically to him.
"Ham." she gasped. "Let's go backl I'm scared!"
"Scared? Of what?" He knew her character; she was valiant to the point of recklessness against any danger she could understand, but let there be a hint of mystery in an occurrence, and her active imagination painted horrors beyond her ability to face.
"I don't know!" she panted. "I—I saw things!"
"Where?"
"In the fog! Everywhere!"
Ham disengaged his arms and dropped his hands to the butts of the weapons in his belt. "What sort of things?" he asked.
"Horrible things! Nightmarish things!"
He shook her gently. "Who's timid now?" he asked, but kindly. The query had the effect he sought; she gripped herself and calmed.
"I'm not frightened!" she snapp
ed. "I was startled. I saw—" She paled again.
"Saw what?"
"I don't know. Shapes in the mist. Great moving things with faces. Gargoyles—devils—nightmares!" She shuddered, then calmed once more.
"I was bending over a little pool out there, examining a biopod, and everything was quiet—sort of deadly quiet. And then a shadow passed in the pool—a reflection of something over me—and I looked up and saw nothing. But then I began to see the fog shapes—horrible shapes—all around me. And I screamed, and then realized you couldn't hear a scream, so I jerked the rope. And then I guess I just closed my eyes and rushed through them to you." She shivered against him.
"All around you?" he asked sharply. "Do you mean between you and me?"
She nodded. "Everywhere."
Ham laughed shortly. "You've had a day dream, Pat. The rope isn't long enough for anything to pass between us without coming so close to one of us that he could see it clearly, and I saw nothing—absolutely nothing."
"Well, I saw something," she insisted, "and it wasn't imaginary. Do you think I'm just a nervous child afraid of strange places? Why I was born on an alien planet!" At his indulgent grin she flared in indignation. "All right! Let's both of us stand here perfectly quiet; perhaps they'll come back again; then we'll see what you think of them."
He nodded agreement, and they stood silently under the translucent dome of mist. There was nothing, nothing but a deep and endless grayness, and an infinite silence, but a silence not like any Ham had ever experienced in his life. For on Venus—even in the sultriest part of the Hotlands— there is always the rustle of teeming life, and the eternal moaning of the underwind, while on Earth no day or night is ever quite silent.
There is always somewhere the sighing of leaves or the rustle of grass or the murmur of water or the voices of insects, or even in the driest desert, the whisper of sand as it warms or cools. But not here; here was such utter stillness that the girl's breathing beside him was an actual relief; it was a silence utter enough to hear.
More Adventures On Other Planets Page 12